My Review: The Fall - Copped It

My Review

The Fall - Copped it

 The duty to have an ever-present mental backbone is a daily appointment for every evolved mind.

 In the busy, highly qualified career of The Fall, the wild, seductive and charming meteor, still unexplored given its incredible abundance of mysteries, came an exhaustive album like The Wonderful and Frightening World of..., China's new atomic bomb to make us bewitched, stunned, necessarily devoted to thought.

 This time I am telling you about a song included in this masterpiece of social consciousness entitled Copped It, the sonic whip that scratches and shatters, envelops and throws us into the mud.

 The Fall in resounding cacophonic form, a sound hive that mashes and suffocates, conveying pain that turns out to be pleasant as well. Here we can listen to class that divides time from space, where the musical representation succeeds in shattering, amidst 60's flashes with choruses towards the end, a fire-eating bass and a guitar pregnant with trained American rock, while the gift of Gavin Friday's voice makes the delirious gunpowder show even more tense and neurotic. 

 A theft, to be specified in the skill of the lyrics (a loose cannon between reality and fantasies turned on at the maximum of the available watts), and the tension of exposed electric wires that in turn steal magnetic waves left parked in American post-punk and the evolved madness of Devo as an attitude. Gavin's voice is perfectly at ease with the one of Mark E. Smith, here truly a representative and benefactor as if he were a modern-day Robin Hood. 

 The sound becomes a prophecy, between futurism and generational chaos of dusty suburbia, but intent on bringing any social stratum back to consciousness, with an unrepentant and impertinent bully attitude that is therefore artistically perfect. All of The Fall's extremism here finds a welcoming bowl where melody is a raspy bone that irritates the eyes: a chant amidst splashes of words and anarchic musical notes that gravitate tirelessly towards madness.

 The world, in the album's title, is perfectly represented in this song: poor, cheating, always on the run, a list that presents the bill for human precariousness. Mark's voice becomes a cleaver but gentle, sharp and strident, perfect on words thrown up to shrink our condition and shake us up. As usual, no room is given to easy listening and the Mancunian band's trademark once again provides us relief: futility and superficiality do not enter the circle of an increasingly unique and extraordinary class. 

 Copped It is a big blade that cuts the ears and makes them bleed: no concession to pity for a set of hysterical presences towards sounds suitable for demolishing the demons of superficiality. A hypnotic dance that eliminates the virus of imbecility. And once again, The Fall anticipate trends, modes and swell the possibilities of making music a trembling, stunned heaven. Mark's ill-concealed disappointment returns to present its hollowed face with a song that knows the ability to be straightforward, without mincing words, without frills, full of rawness that slaps and makes us more aware, yet another unclear act of love that risks, as always, not being understood. The band doesn't care and, in a compact way, writes another memorable act of war coming from a rationality that is more alive than ever. If the heart can have shortcomings it is forgiven for them, Mark, the knight with the hand that continually hurls stones, grants no concessions to the mind and throws its poisonous salt with another magnificent song. The inimitable world of The Fall concedes no room for lacks of style: this is also demonstrated by this track, which grabs our wrists as we listen to it and leads us into a spastic, unhinged, absurd dance that shakes our ramblings. It is a continuous privilege which increases second by second and having it inside you is like taking home a Mona Lisa: it is impossible not to imagine the sharp-tongued poet MES smiling slyly, throwing words like beer in the face of those who think they are listening to a simple pop song.

There is talk of plagiarism and the references are many, and Mark once again establishes that a confused current may be the right way to go to make guilt not a bargain but a detriment: he points the finger without absolving himself, he encourages people to realise the inevitable path of words and music that may have already been there, but he gives his inimitable style the ability to consider everything authentic and not comparable to others. It is also in this that his talent lies and that it drips with pain and greatness strung together, in the artistic marriage that allows a continuous taking and plundering with the reason of making us aware, a  Robin Hood (precisely) who acts consciously by not being afraid to get his hands dirty: it is necessary to see the world as a different and better place, where wealth and poverty are shared without differences of level. Rock proposed from the side of a social service, showing common features, where no one stands out for beauty but the opposite, to make it even clearer that in the grey area of the man from Salford (later Prestwich), diabolical progressions live, making him a Samaritan who clasps his hands together to throw punches: pity is not always the right way to fix things and he knows it very well. So may listening to this deeply wrinkled missile be a legalised robbery and give your thoughts space to shake off the stench of those who think they are safe...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

22nd July 2022

https://youtu.be/rwdsyU2hzIQ